John Billings

John Billings (1729-1780) was a South Carolina militiaman during the American Revolutionary War.

Biography
John Billings was born in South Carolina in 1729, and he befriended Benjamin Martin while serving in the colonial militia during the French and Indian War. The two became close, and Martin was very pleased when Billings enlisted in his militia in 1780 during the American Revolutionary War. Billings was one of the 18 captured at the Battle of King's Highway, and he was freed in a ruse of war engineered by Martin, in which the American prisoners were traded for straw dummies posing as British officers. Billings helped Martin save his family from the Selton plantation on the Santee River, only to find that his own home had been attacked by the British Army. When he saw that his wife and son had been murdered by William Tavington's Green Dragoons, he shot himself in the head with a pistol in front of all of his comrades.